The Contingency of Truth

 The Contingency of Truth

 

 

Truth, at present, seems to be very elusive. That is, important truth, sincerely sought. There are, clearly and depressingly, many people disregarding or twisting truth for partisan ends. Enough is being written on that. I refer, to begin with, to the mostly honest debates about science and policy in dealing with the pandemic. The premisses of the debates are: medical and epidemiological facts (hard truths, if you like); and political and moral priorities (for crude example, economic survival versus survival of the vulnerable), which have to do, not so much with hard facts, but rather hard ethical choices. However, if the former cannot be nailed, the latter may be disastrously misinformed.

 

We can never be complacent about truth, even in the realm of medical science, where many of us may have thought that there were no more real mysteries, just the mopping up of certain diagnoses, treatments and cures.

 

Now we are stood again on uncertain, crumbling ground. It is an unsettling, anxiety inducing place.

 

However, we can suppose that, one day, the truth of the matter will be arrived at – too late for the lives or health of many, and too late for the economic fortunes of many more. The truth of matter may, of course, stop at the boundaries of secure medical and epidemiological science. There will never be an exact truth of the matter in the case of social, health, and economic policy- just, one hopes, a much better chance of avoiding disastrous miscalculation.

 

These pious hopes put faith in science. They assume that modern medical scientific methods are “safe”, in line with the world’s facts and laws. But we know from recent history (let alone going back through the centuries) that medical science can be very contingent, liable to misdirection and error (over smoking, alcohol, sugar and salt, to name some substances that have had varying medical fortunes). But science does advance, slowly at times, sometimes straying into error. Every so often there has been some transformative change in understanding – the “paradigm shift” identified by Thomas Kuhn- in cosmology, in biology, in physics. 

 

There’s progress, if not always with unmitigated benefit, and we cannot know whether progress has finally arrived at a particular terminus.

 

What is often called the genealogy of science shows all this, to our greater or less comfort, depending on our era and the matter in hand. Human morality and social organisation present different problems. The genealogical approach, pioneered especially by Nietzsche, shows just how contingent many of our moral and social worldviews are. We land in some era, in some society, and take our worldview accordingly. Some of us are within some religious tradition, and some of us are within a different one, or within none. Some of us are within societies which privilege obedience to received authority and tradition; some in societies which privilege individual autonomy.

 

It may be that all or most societies share some basic moral concepts, but how and to whom such concepts are applied is a question of worldview. One society may have a sophisticated concept of justice yet practise slavery. Another may outlaw violence, but except strangers, or women. There is nothing that is inevitably and universally true, and that underwrites the shape different worldviews take (though some worldviews may stridently so claim).

 

Philosophers have discussed the radical difference in the outlook and values of, say, a medieval Japanese samurai and those, say, of a tenured British academic in our time. But, in our time, one doesn’t have to make comparisons across centuries. Different and apparently incommensurable worldviews are too obviously present, not just in different cultures and nations, but right here in our own (and especially in the US).

 

So where does a thoughtful person go for firm ground? Is being thoughtful about these issues just another contingent disposition (very probably).

 

Amia Srinivasan, a recently appointed professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University, seeks to address these matters.

 

In a paper delivered in 2019 to the Aristotelian Society (an eminent philosophical body), she works through the philosophical perspectives on genealogical scepticism (the view, summarised above, that values are contingent on era and place).

 

She asks whether a worldview can be genealogically “lucky”, in the sense that scientists coming after, say, Newton or Darwin, were in a luckier state of knowledge than their predecessors. AS herself feels “lucky” in her feminist worldview, but she admits that she cannot refute the sceptic. No doubt Nazis, or the aristocracy of ancient Rome felt equally “lucky”.

 

AS turns to a sort of philo-political defiance: it is not the “truth” of worldviews that counts – it’s their capacity to change things. She has a point. Great turning points in history have been made by the coming into dominance of new worldviews – religious, political, or social. And AS is echoing Karl Marx “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it.”.

 

The problem is, of course, that radical worldviews can be pernicious as well as beneficial in their effects (depending on one’s worldview..). the sceptic is still at large.

 

There’s a role for reason, interrogating the premisses and conclusions of worldviews constructively and, if necessary, destructively. There’s a role for asserting an acceptance of a shared humanity (which may be just another worldview). But at least one can debunk the fallacious and confront the vicious. One can hope.

 

October 2020